The Young Learners Edition (23rd) of the ESL/EFL/ELL Carnival

Welcome to the 23rd edition of the ESL/EFL/ELL Carnival with the focus on Young Learners! Let us start the month with some fantastic resources on motivating and managing young learners. These resourceful reading materials are from many of the finest bloggers, authors, and educators of the English language teaching world! So brew your favorite coffee and indulge in the quotes I share from each post.

You can also enjoy this slideshow with clickable links and music. Just click play and on any of the images to be taken to the post! And, feel free to embed this Vuvox slideshow on your own blog 🙂

Tips, Lessons, & Issues

It is arguable that stories can play a similar role in the context of children learning a second, additional or foreign language as well. From my own experience over many years of teaching, I am convinced that it can. In our classes with children, the magic of stories seems to lie in the way that they provide shared contexts for promoting participation and developing emerging language skills in a natural and spontaneous way. Stories also potentially engage children’s hearts and minds, as people and as thinkers, with issues that are relevant, real and important to them.

Sometimes in class we want to choose one child to do something and often this can be difficult because the kids get annoyed if they aren’t chosen. What criteria do you use to choose which child is going to do whatever it is, or go first? … I recommend a simple technique that I learnt a couple of years ago.

My attempts to include more drama and more ‘unplugged moments’ in my lessons have continued in the new semester and so last week I decided to try some ‘unplugged drama’ with a twist on the classic ‘disappearing dialogue’.

This is a really simple but highly adaptable controlled practice activity that most children really enjoy. Quite simply take a piece of paper show the children how to fold it into 4 or 6. It depends on you. Next get them to number the boxes 1-4 or 1-6. Now you’re ready to draw.

There’s a nice rhythm here, the two children shown as different, each on different spreads, then brought together with a similarity onto one spread. Melanie Walsh uses this rhythmic, visual structure to reinforce her message, which culminates in bringing all four children together.

On my World News for Kids Teacher’s Page, I demonstrate how I build extensive ‘kits’ based on initial news articles, working through reading, extending into listening with additional topical content, then working through a variety of different speaking and writing activities.

This foundation of spoken language is the perfect base from which to begin reading and writing. If students have a good teacher and/or a good course book, then the language they have learned helps them talk about the things that interest them, which means they can learn to write about the things that interest them, and can practice reading things that interest them. It’s a winning situation!…Today, I want to share a very simple activity I use with emergent readers and writers.

This post is based on three activities on video with a young class in their first year of English videotaped as part of a training project for a course on teaching young learners. At the point of being video-taped, this class of Greek children attending classes in a small language school in Athens, had had about 40 hours of English in total, mostly concentrating on oral work.

Listen to the original song and share with your students. What do they imagine about education and school? Here’s what some elementary school students wrote me when I asked their class to give me questions they’d like to know answers about! Imagine if they had the time to explore as they wanted?

I’d never met children with such a low opinion of their own abilities. And there were many like them in the class. The children were spectacularly down on themselves. They were disengaged. They thought they were “the worst class in the school”. Obviously, the urge to do something about this was strong.

Dictogloss is primarily a listening and writing activity used with English Language Learners. It can certainly be done a number of different ways but, very simply-put, the teacher reads a short text, often one students are familiar with…Here are few of the best resources that I’ve found on using the dictogloss strategy.

Kids can do this so naturally, so why don’t WE, adults learn from them? It’s high time we paid more attention to what kids can teach us before they go to school and all their innate knowledge, abilities and aptitudes are slowly or quickly, for that matter, anaesthetised and then killed.

Writing is an important, if sometimes neglected skill, when teaching children English… It is needed at school, it deepens the student’s understanding of English grammar and vocabulary, it helps students develop their own thinking, provides an alternative creative output for children, allows students to work at their own pace alone, or can be used to encourage group work and more social interaction.

Whether I like to admit it or not, one of my biggest struggles in any classroom is maintain the attention of my students. It seems humor, especially in the East Asian countries where I taught, can help to break the ice.

Yoshikawa observed that Mexican-American preschoolers have a very low rate of preschool enrollment in the United States, while the rate of enrollment for preschoolers in the country of origin of their families is very high.

They are digital natives, I know but they are only good at playing computer games and as they are young learners they are slower than the teenagers. However, they are more motivated and enthusiastic. I belive if they hear their voices published on their class blogs they will be more willing.

You’ve probably sat on a bus or train and see someone playing ‘braintraining‘ and finding out how old their brain is. You may even have played it yourself. This popular hand held puzzle video game was designed by a prominent neuroscientist who claims that playing the games’ puzzles reduces the chances of dementia in old age.

Learn the colors for free with our new iPhone app. We were on the iTunes “Whats New and Noteworthy” area. So you can be assured that it is noteworthy. In fact it is much more than noteworthy it’s amazing!

I remember teaching a group of 14 seven to eight year-old students. They climbed the walls (oddly there were racks on the walls), fought a lot, and flew paper airplanes everywhere. I went home after a 9 hour day and cried. I wanted to quit. I have a fighting spirit, though, so I went online to research lessons and ideas. Throughout the four years that I have been teaching in Germany I have collected some great research, resources, and tips to make me a much better English teacher of young learners!

Looking forward to the next carnival?

The Carnival welcomes any blog posts, including examples of student work, that are related to teaching or learning English. You can contribute a post to it by using this easy submission form. If the form does not work for some reason, you can send the link to Larry Ferlazzo via his Contact Form. The following edition will be published by Eva Buyuksimkesyan on September 1st. The November 1st edition will be hosted by Berni Wall. Let Larry Ferlazzo know if you might be interested in hosting future editions.

You can see all the previous editions of the ESL/EFL/ELL Blog Carnival here.

What are your tips for working with young learners?

Shelly Sanchez Terrell is a teacher trainer, instructional designer, adjunct professor, and the author of The 30 Goals Challenge for Teachers: Small Steps to Transform Your Teaching and Learning to Go: Lesson Ideas for Teaching with Mobile Devices, Cell Phones and BYOT. She has been recognized by the ELTon Awards, The New York Times, the Ministry of Education in Spain, and Microsoft’s Heroes for Education as an innovator in the movement of teacher-driven professional development and education technology. Recently, she was named Woman of the Year 2014 by Star Jone’s National Association of Professional Women and awarded a Bammy Award as a founder of #Edchat, the Twitter chat that spurred over 400 teacher chats. She has trained teachers and taught learners in over 25 countries and has consulted with organizations worldwide such as UNESCO Bangkok, The European Union aPLaNet Project, Cultura Iglesa of Brazil, the British Council in Tel Aviv, IATEFL Slovenia, HUPE Croatia, and VenTESOL. She shares regularly via TeacherRebootCamp.com, Twitter (@ShellTerrell), and Facebook.com/shellyterrell. Her greatest joy is being the mother of Rosco the pug.

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